This is the first of many technical articles that we will be releasing as we begin our work to bring Hiitch to you as promised in our previous blog postings. We will basically focus on the technology behind building a complete desktop social networking platform like Hiitch and how you can better utilize it for your own purposes without reinventing the wheel. Your suggestions and feedback will be greatly appreciated. You can also write to us about what you would like to know regarding the technologies behind Hiitch.

Hiitch is designed and developed to build a vibrant online community on the desktop. It delivers things of interest such as new people and events to the user by analyzing the user’s profile. It does automatic match making and has an array of features to allow users to interact online (eg. IM, file sharing, photo sharing, community forums, etc) at real time. All these are done securely on the desktop using technologies such as digital signature verification, SSL, data encryption and etc.

Another discussion on Hiitch’s security features can also be found from our previous posting:

How Secure Is Hiitch?

Hiitch is basically (or partially) a client and server networking model. It is not intended to work with web proxies as they post as a big security risk and information leak. All communication done on Hiitch has to be done with direct connections to either the server or the client. A peer to peer model (p2p) for the clients is not used because not all networks allow p2p technologies to work correctly. Some networks hide their computers with transparent proxies to better protect their internal network which result in p2p connection problems. Other disadvantages include the fact that users must have enough know how to configure their home or private network to work with p2p solutions (port forwarding, firewall, DMZ and etc). Often than not a home or private network consists of a group of computers (LAN) and this will require multiple IP addresses not available to most home users. P2P is still a very good networking model and we are still experimenting on how best to combine both p2p models and the more traditional client server models to produce a best of both world solution.

Internally, Hiitch uses a technique similar to remote procedure call (RPC). We will discuss this in more detail in a separate post. All communication data in Hiitch is transmitted using XML. This decision was to allow the client and server to become technology independent and open up possibilities to “just in time” instruction discoveries. So regardless of the programming language used to build the server or client, the only requirement for them (to communicate) is understanding XML. Each instruction(s) send from the client to the server is decrypted (when necessary), parsed and resolved into a set of runtime instructions. These instructions are then checked to see if they are allowed to run. Finally, the instructions are then executed on the server and any results available are returned to the client.

We hope this article will get you excited about Hiitch and the technology behind it. Our hope is that we can build a strong community of experts who are interested and willing to work with us to produce ground breaking social networking technologies for the generations ahead. Join our community today!

We have been discussing among ourselves about open sourcing Hiitch for a while now. When we say open source Hiitch, we mean both the server and the client code. A totally complete and open desktop social networking platform that others can use, extend, customize and redistribute on their own. Can open source really help us compete or is it the end of us? We have only recently come to an agreement that open source is an option that we will seriously consider in the near future. We have put into Hiitch our heart & soul and we are unsure if open source is a right move at this stage.

Why do we want to open source Hiitch?

• We envision Hiitch to become a free but personal social networking platform that everyone will use to meet new friends and stay connected. No barriers!
• We want to move the development fast enough to challenge the current market players and existing technologies.
• We desire a vibrant development community that will keep innovating with us.

Our biggest problem now is that we do not have the financial resources to fulfill all or any of the above goals. My argument for open source is that we can allow others to build smaller networks of their immediate social circle and then build software to connect these smaller social networks together to form a mega network of independent networking peers. We can achieve this with little or no cost at all using open source approaches. The open source community has already shown that the last two points is workable so I will not elaborate more on it.

What are our fears of open sourcing Hiitch?

• It scares away potential investors and greatly reduces our value as a commercial company.
• The open source community do not see a need for such a product and hence no vibrant development community.

The worse thing to happen is that we cannot financially support ourselves to innovate and develop ground breaking software for the social networking messes. Merely selling value added services on top of a free software platform is also not an easy approach. We also worry that a geek community cannot attract enough normal average users for which a life style application like Hiitch is build for.

Feel free to share your views with us on this matter.

Have you noticed the cool widget on the right side of our blog? It’s our new Shout! widget. This web widget collaborates with Hiitch on the desktop by aggregating live shout messages from our members at real time. We hope to use this concept widget to bridge the distinct line between web and desktop applications by delivering a seamless and interactive solution across both platforms.

To interact with Shout!, you need to install Hiitch first. If you are an existing Hiitch member, simply type a message into your Hiitch shout box or change your display picture. The widget will catch those changes and display it live. Shout! widget allows your web buddies to check out new and cool people on Hiitch without the need to access it.

You can grab this widget for free right now on our community page and display it on your blog, personal website or social network profile.

Hiitch Pte Ltd is looking for investors who has/have the same vision as us and is/are willing to join efforts with us to establish the next generation social network. We have not been seriously looking for investment up until now. The main reason that we are starting to look for investment is because we realize that Hiitch needs the financing to expand faster to level the odds with our competition.

Hear Us Out!

You may think that on-line social networking is almost over with huge domination from companies such as MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Bebo and etc. However, we think otherwise! On-line social networking is far from being over but just beginning. There are lots of areas in this field itself that has not been researched and explored but has great value. Communication tools aside, many of these existing services only allows you to place a profile and wait for things to happen. We classify these services as hit and run because of the way they encourage their users to relate to each other. But we envision Hiitch to be far from these hit and run services.

Hiitch is about researching and exploring at real time:
- new ways for you to meet people of your interest.
- new ways for you to widen your social circle.
- new ways to tract your relationships with others.
- new ways for you to find deals and opportunities.
- etc…

All our work is centered around the context of a personalized community in the space of a larger social network. Work in these areas have huge implications not just for the average net-citizen but also for businesses, organizations and etc.

Drop us a mail or contact us directly if you have interest in investing on what we are doing.

Hiitch community is a public area for you to participate in events, topic discussion, gallery posting and many more. It is a place to meet new people who share your interests.

Live Board

Live board lets you make postings and engage in topic discussion with other members in the network. Anyone in Hiitch is allowed to start a new topic in live board. To create a new topic, click on the “New Topic” icon. Choose a category to post and enter your title and message. You can set your topic to public or private.

When you set your topic to private, only your contacts can access those topic. You can also choose to notify all your friends in your contact list when you create a new topic by checking on the “Alert Contacts” checkboxes.